They met about seven years ago. He was working behind the counter at Kinko's, and Art rolled by in his electric chair with something to copy -- one of Art's books of poetry, John thinks (Art was always giving copies away).

It took John a while to figure out what Art was saying. The words clawed their way out of him slowly, painfully. Sometimes it took Art five minutes just to say a single sentence. But John was patient, and Art started stopping by to visit three, four times a day.

After Art left the store, people would often say things to John like, "My God, what courage." "That guy -- he's so inspiring."

John, who has become quite close to Art over the years, still hears it. All the time.

"Frankly, it's gotten to the point where it really annoys me. I don't mean to say Art doesn't have courage. It's just that he has no choice."

When I share this with Art a few hours later, he laughs uproariously and nods his head.

"I'm not that courageous," he agrees. "I do what I do because I'm afraid to not do what I do. That's not courage."

So, let's just accept from the start that the story of Arthur Honeyman is not another profile in courage, one of those stories of hurdles overcome and life reaffirmed. Best to dispense with all that from the start. It is so not Art. As he puts it: "What else do you want to know?"

His life and his art are so much more complicated -- and decidedly unconventional -- than all that.

II. Art, For Art's Sake

You may have seen him. Spinning around downtown Portland on the edge of a vodka buzz, plastic bags and backpacks stuffed with papers and books swinging from the arms of his wheelchair, a bright orange flag that says "Freedom Rider" snapping in his wake.

He is 65 but looks older, curled in on himself like a question mark. His hands are frozen into fists. When he was in his 20s, he could walk a little ("And crawl a lot"), but those days have long since passed. He is an extremely natty, but eclectic dresser, who favors claret-colored berets and pressed Hawaiian shirts. He wore Ugg boots long before they were fashionable.

Speech is difficult for Art -- his words often come out missing consonants, the vowels flattened -- and sometimes people mistake this for a lack of intelligence.

They do so at their own peril.

During the past four decades, Art has been a prolific writer, churning out volumes of poetry and children's books and courtly, but ultimately contrarian, letters to editors, apartment managers, city leaders and anyone else in a position of power who has thrown up an obstacle worth bumping against.

He has expounded on subjects ranging from curb cuts to people's fear of his appearance to the need to defend the free speech rights of street preachers (even though he himself professes "faith in nothing or no one except for the dynamics of existence" and has on more than one occasion, when asked by such preachers if he believes in God, replied, deadpan: "I. Am. God.")

Currently, Art is at work on the story of his life. He has tentatively titled it "Art for Arts Sake: The Autobiography of a Spastic."

They were nearly out of Missouri, nosing their way toward Oklahoma when the contractions started. The doctors had told her she wasn't due for another two months. But this baby clearly wasn't waiting for their cross-country adventure to finish. So, the next thing they knew, they were in a delivery room at St. Luke's waiting for the slap and the cry.

It's a boy, the doctor said.

Later, the doctors would make another announcement: Cerebral palsy, a form of brain damage that can occur before or during birth and can affect speech and muscle control. Who knows how it happened? When Art tells the story now, he likes to joke it was the doctor's slap on his behind that made him this way.

Back then, conventional wisdom held that children like Art should be sent to live in institutions, where they were labeled crippled, idiots or worse. But his parents weren't having any of that. His mother was a Vassar College graduate who spoke six languages; his father, a wool broker who had attended Reed College and the University of Washington, though he never graduated from either. They were both well-read, intellectually curious, and they expected no less from their son. They fought to keep him at home and out in the world. They battled for him to attend public schools at a time when mainstreaming was virtually unheard of.

From an early age, Art learned to ignore conventional wisdom.

IV. Art, 21 Random Facts

He has a master's degree in literature from Portland State University ( though he had to fight to get in as an undergrad -- this was before federal laws guaranteed people with disabilities a right to an education).

He uses too many commas when he writes.

He's hopped a freight train (he hoped to go to Berkeley, but woke up in Eugene).

Once, he showed up for a costume party wearing nothing but a headband.

He burned his draft card.

He was raised chiefly by his father; his mother had schizophrenia and spent much of her life in mental institutions. When he was 34, Art embarked on a 2-1/2-month cross-country journey to spring her out.

Art has no children of his own, but he helped raise first wife Jo Ann's seven grandchildren; he loves it when they call him Grandpa.

He has been arrested three times for protesting at the Trojan nuclear power plant.

He likes to take friends out to the fanciest restaurants in Portland if only because he knows his presence might put some people off their food. "He does it on purpose," says his friend Erik Ferguson. "He knows people don't expect to see the likes of him in a place like that."

He is an incorrigible flirt and has been married twice (his second wife, from Cuba, was nearly 30 years younger). "Yeah, yeah, I'm a playboy," he says, archly.

Sometimes, he visits strip clubs.

In the 1960s, he lived in an urban commune. Later, he and his friends bought a 40-acre communal farm in the Coast Range of northern Oregon; he is one of the two remaining original members.

Once, he shuffled his wheelchair all the way to Salem along the freeway to protest the lack of disabled access on buses.

He didn't start to write until he was in his late 20s. His 1977 children's book, "Sam and His Cart," loosely based on his childhood, was made into a movie. A lot of people consider it his best work.

For a few years, he taught English and home economics at the now-shuttered Adams High School. His classes were rumored to be among the best-behaved.

He performs with a contact-improvisation dance group.

Twice, he ran for state Legislature on a platform of "Spastic Power." He did not win. One of those times, his opponent was Vera Katz. "I got whipped bad." He is gleeful when he says this.

He has been robbed several times by people he has asked to help him get something out of his pocket. He turned the experiences into a poem.

He has been hit by cars six times in the past six years. Two times it was his fault. He has not yet written a poem about this.

When he was in his 20s and 30s, he was so depressed he often thought about killing himself.

Now at 65, he says, "I shudder to think of what I might have been if I had not been born with cerebral palsy."

V. Art, In His Own Words

Feb. 8, 1971

You're Damn Right We Will

We'll show them anyhow

You're damn right we will

We'll roll down the street

We'll hobble we'll crawl

We'll struggle blindly

With dog or cane

We'll shake we'll drool

We'll be a disgusting spectacle

We'll show them our heritage

And our lack of heritage

We'll show them they can't ignore

Our screams of "Cripple Power"

"We want more"

We'll break down the walls to boxes

That they've stuck us in for years

And placated us with paternalistic help

We'll show them how realistic we can be

By living our fantasies

We'll show them in living color

What it means to drool while you laugh

To grope while you walk -- to roll over a curb

And have a thousand people look away from

you

We'll show them with love that Jesus Christ

Only suffered a little while on a cross

With thorns in his crown and nails in his

bloody hands

but

not

for years at a time

and not without hope.

Jamie Francis

VI. Art, The Climb

Art lives in a one bedroom apartment just off the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland. Most days he wakes at 5 a.m. A few hours later, a young woman named Katy Michael, whom Art has hired as a secretary, arrives to take his dictation.

On a recent morning, they were hard at work on Art's autobiography. They were nearing the end of the third chapter, which Art had decided to call "Thoughts About My Personal Independence." To illustrate the chapter, he chose a photograph of himself posing, fist raised, in front of mural of Che Guevera.

For years, Art has relied on other people -- his scribes -- to help him get his thoughts down on paper. He composes what he wants to say in his head, then dictates to the scribe who can translate what he says onto the computer, one word at a time. On a good day, it might take an hour to produce a couple of paragraphs.

Art asked Katy to pick up where they had left off the day before, after a section that read in part, "I'm inexplicably compelled to choose the rocky road to personal survival. Why? Because the rocks are there! Let's face it. I'm a bloody rock climber, nothing less, nothing more! I'm in love with life at its fullest."

"No," said Art. (A friend once asked Art if he liked people finishing his thoughts for him. "Only when you're right," he replied.)

"Confess?" said Katy.

"Yeah!" cried Art. "Confess!"

"OK," said Katy, "I . . . must . . . confess. . ."

She finished typing, then stopped. "You know, you already have three commas in this sentence," she said. "I must confess if you put in a fourth I am going to quit." This broke Art up laughing.

When he is not writing -- which he is doing a great deal of the time, though he has slowed down considerably compared with the years when he voraciously self-published volume after volume of his poetry and essays, which he sold at Saturday Market -- Art likes to explore the city. He invited me to accompany him one day not long ago.

We met at the coffee shop near his apartment where they keep a porcelain mug with his name on it behind the counter.

"I hope you don't mind walking," he said, and he was off. I did my best to keep up. Art, I discovered, is a jaywalker, fearlessly barreling into crosswalks while the signal is still red. He also takes the curb cuts rather quickly, and a couple of times, his chair rocked precariously forward as he entered the street. He has tipped over in the past, he told me, and had to wait some time, as people streamed past him, for someone to finally stop and help.

A lot of Art's adventures in the city are dependent on strangers willing to let down their guard and help him. The man working at the bank, who must get Art's wallet out of his pocket and put his cash in it. The waitress who helps hoist him up in his chair. Art has this funny way of finding people who need him, too.

"Those of us who know Art and who have helped him all talk about how we have a certain amount of gratitude that he is in our lives," says John Burk, Arthur's friend from Kinko's. "Art requires you to get involved on an emotional level. That's something most of us seem to try and minimize in our lives, particularly in this place and time, in this culture. We're trying to keep pretty thick walls up. Art gives you some experience living without them."

Once, in the middle of a conversation, Art asked me, "How do you feel talking to me?"

It was one of the most disarming, fascinating things anyone had ever asked.

Art, says David Holloway, an English professor at Portland State University who has known him since his undergraduate days, "has an unexpected way of bringing out the deeper implications of things."

Although Art knows people all over the city, he spends a lot of time alone, navigating the streets by himself. "I have a very rich interior life," he says. "I love my own jokes, which most nobody else understands."

He likes to go for hikes by himself in Forest Park or Washington Park. Occasionally, he gets stuck, "but help soon arrives and my situation becomes an adventure in a variety of ways for more than one person. Sometimes, long-term friendships have sprouted in this manner."

About once a week, he heads out into the winding, tony streets of the West Hills -- "where wheelchairs don't go."

He climbs as high as he can, then stares out across the great arching back of the city, the rutted roads beneath him, quietly marveling at the way he came.